Category Archives: art

The thought crossed my mind of a holiday greeting, and then I began to think about a 1905 Odessa Hanukkah. I tried looking around the internet for something that felt right.

Antique Russian silver menorah

Wooden dreidels

The only image I found online of a family Hanukkah was a painting from the 1700s.

Anonymous 18th century

Then I remembered that I had an illustrated story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, born in 1902, A Hanukkah evening in my parents’ house, which began:

All year round my father, a rabbi in Warsaw, did not allow his children to play any games. Even when I wanted to play cat’s cradle with my younger brother, Moishe, Father would say, ‘Why lose time on such nonsense? Better to recite psalms.’… But on Hanukkah, after Father lit the Hanukkah candles, he allowed us to play dreidel for half an hour.

For most families, it was not the play that was forbidden on other days of the year, but gambling.

A Hanukkah evening in my parents’ house

Russian antique menorah

Russian menorah c 1894

German antique menorah

Polish menorah 1900

Czech menorah

English antique menorah

It was not only the antique menorahs which were an art form. The tradition has carried on in many styles and materials. The pattern of the stone wall on the silver dreidel and this 1930s menorah from Palestine made me think of a prison but must symbolise the Wailing Wall, although it is usually shown with figures.

The Royal Academy of Art in London has had an exhibition called Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 which was inspired by a Leningrad exhibition in 1932 Fifteen years of artists of the Russian Soviet Republic, an exhibition which showed the incredible diversity of Russian art at a time when the avant-garde and social realism still existed side-by-side. However, from the late 1920s pressure mounted against abstraction in art and after 1932 it was deemed to be unacceptable. The exhibition includes paintings, prints, posters, photographs, ceramics and film clips, some from the 1929 film The man with a movie camera. A few of the art works from the exhibition are copied below, along with others by the exhibition artists that were not in the exhibition. Some celebrate the excitement of the time, while others express something more ominous. Many of the photographs, like futurism, play on the repetition of industrialisation and mechanised work, but others delve into blurred identities, overlapping images, and images taken at disconcertingly strange angles, possibly hinting at the confusion and uncertainties of the times.

A moment to remember the February 1917 revolution. Looking at the artwork in the proliferation of satirical journals that sprang up in 1905-6, it feels like the energy for revolution was actually at that time. But it was in 1917, when the country was already torn apart by war, that the population was ready for a revolution which was then followed by three more years of civil war and more pogroms against the Jews. It is probably difficult or impossible for some years to get the kind of meticulous records that existed before the revolution and many people would have fallen into the cracks of history.

To mark this moment I will try and put together some of the posters, illustrations and photographs from 1905 and 1917, and look at the memoirs of two young girls who lived through the revolution, one from the impoverished branch of an aristocratic family, and the other the daughter of Jewish revolutionaries. Both girls ended up leaving Russia shortly after the Civil War and ending up in England.

18 February: The strike at the Putilov factory in St. Petersburg
23 February: the beginning of anti-war demonstrations

24-25 February: the general strike under the slogan “Down with autocracy!”
26 Feb: battles between soldiers, divided between support for the revolution or the tzar
27 February: The beginning of the armed uprising, a massive shift of soldiers to the side of the rebels. Establishment of the State Duma of the Interim Committee under the chairmanship of the president of the Duma, Rodzianko

1 March: the establishment of the new government in Moscow

2 March: the abdication of Nicholas II from the throne in favor of Prince Michael, who handed over power to the Provisional Government. Formation of the Provisional Government headed by Prince Lvov, who was replaced in July by socialist Kerensky

28 February 1917

February Revolution 1917 Ivan Vladimirov

Edith Almedingen wrote her memoir about her childhood in early 1900s Russia, Tomorrow will come, in 1941, never having believed that anyone would be interested in her mundane life in St Petersburg simply trying to survive on the periphery of the great political events between 1905 and 1920. Her mother had been brought up in England in a Russian aristocratic family with an English mother, and her father was a well-known professor of chemistry, from a wealthy family, but her father left the family when she was a baby and her mother scraped by teaching English. Shortly after the 1905 revolution, when Edith was six, her brother drowned falling through cracked ice in the river. Her father, who she had never known, died when she was 12, and an older brother died in the First World War. She had been living in extreme poverty with her mother after the 1909 crash and then had a few years at an aristocratic girls’ boarding school where her father had modernised the curriculum and taught science. The beauty of this book is in her descriptions of the sights, smells and feelings of hunger, cold and horror that she experienced as a teenager after the revolution as the infrastructure of the city failed and there was no longer any running water in the city, food to eat, or fuel for heating. People dressed in rags, spent most of the day queueing for bread, and went from one illness to another. Her mother died of starvation and illness in 1919.

Queue 1917

She tells a story about the brightly coloured painted signs with pictures used by shopkeepers in Russia as most people were illiterate. In 1919 the shops were mostly empty and closed but the signs remained mocking people, especially one with a “luscious purple ham, reinforced by twin coils of fat crimson sausages”. She continues:

But that morning I saw a cluster of people in front of the deserted shop, and, coming nearer, I saw a frail, grey-haired man, his thin hands coming out of the sleeves of a very shabby overcoat. Those hands clawed at the gaily painted sign. An old lady, a torn black lace scarf over her grey hair, was trying to wrench him away. Yet, though obviously feeble, he resisted her efforts, and there was something of a nightmare about those thin, blue-veined hands clinging to the painted wood. I heard a tremulous voice: ‘No, my dear, I simply must have another slice of that ham. I wish you would be a little more patient. See if I don’t cut it off neatly. If we were to leave it here, somebody else would get it, and nobody could be as hungry as you and I are’, and the thin hands went on clawing away, until blood began trickling from under the nails, and the painted wood showed white where the knuckle of the ham had been scratched. (124)

Eventually, she meets a nurse she had known early in the war when she had translated for an English charity who shares her room with her and encourages her to apply to the university. In 1922, as she was finishing her degree, precious passports for foreign travel first began to be issued. She had recently managed to arrange a convalescence in the Crimea for possible TB, but then remembered the first letter in five years she had received from her mother’s sister in Italy a few months before hoping they would meet again. Possibly they would allow her to convalesce in Italy. A couple of months later she had her passport and left Russia forever.

Civil War

The other memoir, Daughter of revolution: a Russian girlhood remembered, by Vera Broido (1998), was written from the perspective of a child who was only 10 when the revolution began. She had been living in Siberia with her mother, Eva Broido, who had been exiled for her revolutionary activities, but they hurried back first to Moscow and then Saint Petersburg. Vera also translated her mother’s memoir Memoirs of a revolutionary which is a much more political and factual book. This is a far less bleak book than Edith’s, partly because Vera was still a child, although often having the responsibilities of an adult, still had family alive, and, most importantly, had a family with strong connections and deep friendships with other revolutionaries who were quick to help each other. Although eventually, as Mensheviks, they were on the losing side against the Bolsheviks. Also, although they were still hungry and freezing cold, Vera and her mother had been given the apartment of a wealthy banker, who was hiding, to look after, while Edith had nowhere to live after her mother died, losing their two rooms, moving from one sordid shared room to another.

Vera emphasises the ordinary side of life at that time, both for exiles in Siberia, where her mother ran the hospital pharmacy and they knew many other interesting professional exiles, and after the revolution in Saint Petersburg, where, although there was little to eat, the arts were flourishing and they went to the theatre, concerts and the opera. She also went to school for the first time, although, by 1919, when the Civil War reached Petrograd, school simply meant sitting by a stove and getting a bowl of gruel . Vera’s mother also became ill but they were able to escape in 1920 to Berlin, where Vera crammed most of her education into one year and passed the examinations for German universities. In 1927, her mother returned to Russia with false papers for a short visit to make contact with Mensheviks who had remained in Russia, but she stayed longer and was arrested, imprisoned, and eventually shot in 1941. Vera studied art in Paris and then returned to Germany, remaining until 1933, when her whole family moved to England, where her brother was working as an engineer. Unlike Edith, Vera always had some family around her, and often old friends from Russia and their exile in Siberia.

Be on guard!

Like all stories of war, in both these memoirs survival depended on luck – a chance meeting, a moment of kindness, or an official turning a blind eye. At a time when she had no job and no place to stay, Edith met the nurse she had known earlier after being knocked down by a carriage and breaking her ankle. After Vera and her mother crossed the border into Polish territory, they used their last money on the train to Warsaw hoping they would find her father there. Instead they found he had moved on to Vienna and they were left penniless, wandering the cold, slushy streets with their boarded-up shops until her mother noticed a diamond earring on the ground. After more wandering they saw a small light inside one shuttered jewellers and found a Jewish jeweller there who was dubious about receiving what would appear to be a stolen diamond. However, he listened to their story and said he would put the diamond aside until a later date, but, first things first, he would get them a first-class compartment and meal on the train to Vienna. Without these chance moments of kindness the stories might have been very different.

One pogrom victim in the death records, written about in the newspapers, who was brutally murdered by the police, was Leon Victor Vysotsky, 26, a teacher and member of the Self Defence League. An excerpt from the article in the Jewish Chronicle is in the blog entry Who was or wasn’t on the pogrom death list? Where did they live? Stories from the reports and newspapers.

Jewish Chronicle 15 December 1905

A Jewish female teacher was hastening to the house of her parents in Peressip when she was stopped by a ruffian who, assuring her he was not going to do any harm, asked her to show him her teeth. To humour him she opened her mouth into which he immediately fired, killing her on the spot. Another incident is now corroborated by a Sister of Charity. A man named Leon Vyssotosky was wounded while fighting front rank of the defenders. He was placed on an ambulance to be removed, when he was violently dragged to the ground by soldiers and then handed over to a disguised policeman, who put an end to his sufferings. Vyssotosky was one of the most energetic members of the Self Defence League, and was a remarkable orator. It is presumed that he was known to the police as such, and this was the reason of his being murdered.

Yet another horrible story. In Prochovskaya Street, while the pillage went on, a Sister of Mercy drove along with a wounded old man in her carriage. Four little children ran crying in the middle of the street, begging her to take them to their parents, whom they could not find. Before they could reach the carriage, two were shot and the other two run through by bayonets. In the same street five children were thrown out of third story windows. Two of them, one two months and the other 12 months old, died immediately.

Yet again, there is evidence of many children being killed while so few were registered in the Jewish records. It seems that possibly someone wanted to hide the extreme horror of this massacre, or the great loss, not just of men, but women and children.

When I first wrote about Leon Vysotsky, I looked up his name in Odessa directories and found that there was a large Moscow tea company with a warehouse and tea packing factory in Odessa called В Высоцкий & Ко, (V. Vysotsky & Co or Wissotzky & Co). There was a possibility that Leon Victor was related to this family but I didn’t look into it further. Then, a few weeks ago, information about my own family brought me back to the first pages of my great aunt’s memoir where she describes her grandfather and his eight children. She makes the comment that he was not so lucky in his sons but that two of his daughters married well – one to a very well off textile merchant from Bialystok, Leon Sackheim, and the other to the son of one of the richest merchants in Moscow, Wisozki, the Moscow Tea King. Many years ago I had tried looking up this Moscow tea company using the wrong spelling and had not got anywhere but now I found quite a few histories of the Wissotzky tea company online and several family trees. It is the only Russian tea company from that time that is still operating. It moved to Israel in the 1930s having left Russia for other European countries after the revolution. From the early 1900s it had had offices in Warsaw, London, Paris, New York and Philadelphia.

Vysotsky house Moscow

Vysotsky tea advertisement

From the online family trees, I discovered that the founder, Kalman Wolf Yakov Wissotzky, who was from Zagare in Lithuania, had only one son, David, in 1861. On the family trees, his wife was Anna Borisovna. His wife’s maiden name was unknown except on one family tree where it was Sackheim. David Wissotzky supported many artists in Moscow and his wife was painted twice by Leonid Pasternak, a close family friend. His son, Boris Pasternak, tutored the Wissotzky children one summer after he had left school, and was inspired by his love for one of the daughters, Ida, to become a poet. The name on Anna’s 1911 portrait is AB Vysotskaya-Gotz, so I assumed that Anna was a member of the Gotz family, a family one of her daughters also married into, producing two famous revolutionary sons, Mikhail and Abram Gots. One way or another she did not seem to be my great great aunt, as her surname was Piker.

AB Vysotskaya-Gotz, Leonid Pasternak

I was interested that Anna was thought to belong to the Sackheim family, and began to investigate who Leon (Leib) Sackheim was. I found his birth record: he was born in Bialystok in 1848 to Khaim Ber Shmul and Kreina, and he died in 1905. I could not find his marriage but I found the birth of one of his children, Feiga, in 1879, born to Lev and Asna Zakheim. I originally found my great great aunt, Asna Piker, as an eight-year-old, on the 1858 revision list (tax census) from Gorodische, near Novogrudok, Belarus, with her parents Meer Hirsh Piker (my great great grandfather), and Rivka, and her four siblings. So Asna was born in 1850 and would have been 29 when Feiga was born. Another four children were registered to a Leib Khaim Ber Zakheim between 1872 and 1884, Abram, Moisei, Dvora and Hersh. I then found the marriage certificate for David Vulf Visotzky (St Petersburg) and Khaia Khaim-Berko Zakheim (Bialystok) who married in Vilnius in 1876. In Russian, Khaia Khaim-Ber, became Anna Borisova. So, it was not my great great aunt who married into the wealthy Wissotzky family, but Leon Zakheim’s sister and Asna Zakheim’s sister-in-law.

The Wissotzkys and Odessa

In the online Wissotzky family trees, there is a puzzling 15 year gap in children between David’s 2 elder sisters born in the 1840s, and the 2 later children, David and another sister born in the early 1860s. The father and founder of the great tea company must have been desperate for sons to carry on his business and name, and I assume there must have been children in between who died, especially as none of the family names, such as Jacob and Rafael, Wolf’s father and grandfather, appear to have been used. Two sons-in-law and one sister went into the business with David. They also needed reliable people to run offices in other Russian cities and around the world. An especially important city was Odessa where the tea was shipped in, and from the 1890s, blended, and packed. The symbol of the Wissotzky tea company was a ship as they were one of the first companies to take advantage of new shipping routes and being able to transport tea by sea rather than overland from China. So I began to wonder whether, if Wolf Wissotzky did not have a son to organise their business affairs in Odessa, other family members, nephews or cousins, had worked for him there.

Wissotzky tea packing factory, Kanatnaya and Troitskaya

Wolf Wissotzky was also a Hebrew scholar and Zionist who belonged to a Zionist group in Odessa and funded a Zionist journal in the 1890s. The men he trusted with running his offices around the world were Zionists from Odessa merchant families. When the company became incorporated in the 1890s and he was able to set up a tea packing factory in Odessa, he hired a Zionist friend, Karl Tauer, to run the company, and other Zionist friends, Abraham Lubarsky and Asher Ginsberg, ran his offices in New York and London. However, previous to the 1890s, he would have needed someone in Odessa to keep charge of the affairs. Puzzling over why so many Odessans were hired to manage the foreign offices, I realised that only very successful established Jewish merchants were allowed to live in Moscow, so it would have been difficult to find people to train in the business there. Wissotzky managed to come to Moscow in the 1840s, before he had a business, and worked for a successful Jewish tea merchant, Botkin, and only set up his own company in 1853, when Botkin died. But in 1871 there were only about 8000 Jews in Moscow, and even in 1880 there were only 16,000 (8000 officially registered).

At the time of the 1905 pogrom, Abraham Lubarsky, the wealthy Odessa merchant who ran the Wissotzky company in New York, returned to Odessa and wrote of his experiences during the pogrom in a series of letters which were published in New York newspapers while he was also fundraising in America for the people affected by the pogrom. Lubarsky was involved with setting up the Jewish self defence league after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, alongside other Zionists like Jabotinsky. Below is an excerpt from one of the newspaper articles:

The Sun New York 17 November 1905

2 November: At dawn the massacre of Jews was renewed. They are now pillaging the Deribasovsky (the Broadway of Odessa) under the protection of the Cossacks, who are driving back the “Self-Defence” in order that the hooligans may pursue their bloody work without hindrance. A delegation of Jews visited Baron Kaulbars, the military commander, who is known as a rabid Jew baiter. After being told that the police are engaged in pillage and murder he said it was untrue and declared that he would take action only when he will be convinced by facts. The younger Wissetzky (a son of the largest tea merchant in Russia) took his life in his hands and ventured to the Jewish hospital where lay a “Self-Defence.” Wisetzky demanded of the authorities a certificate about their presence there. At first the Jewish doctors were fearful to sign a certificate of that kind, but they complied at last. Presently a military patrol with an officer came to remove the injured policemen. The younger Wissetzky demanded that the officer in charge of the patrol should also certify to the effect that he took away the injured. He did so. Armed with this evidence Wissetzky returned to Baron Kaulbars, and it was thought that the commander would keep his word and put down the massacre. But nothing-of the kind. The pillage and massacre is kept up to-day.

The ‘younger Wissotzky’ must refer to Wolf’s son David, although at first I thought it might refer to another son who was working in Odessa. David might have come to Odessa to meet with Lubarsky, or he had arrived because of the unrest in the city and fears for their factory. It is unknown whether he had any relations working for the business. His cousin, the revolutionary Mikhail Gots, who had belonged to the People’s Will from 1885 and had spent many years in Siberia, had been allowed to move to Odessa from Siberia in 1899 because of ill-health, and he had worked for the tea company until 1901 when he went abroad and continued his revolutionary activities. He died in 1906 from a spinal tumour which was thought to be caused by blows to his spine while he was in Siberia. But one wonders if David went to the hospital to see a member of the self-defence league because he knew Leon Vysotzky and heard that he had been attacked.

When Lubarsky returned to New York he was interviewed by the New York Times:

New York Times 5 March 1906

‘During the riot I got out of my carriage in front of my office. A policeman lifted his pistol as if to shoot me, and I brandished my cane as though I would strike him. Seeing me do this, he thought I must not be a Jew, for surely no Jew would threaten a policeman! But just then my employees began to shout my name ‘Lubarsky!’ from the windows. At that the officer knew I was really a Jew. As I went in the door he shot, but the bullet went past.

It was 1000 times worse in Moscow. A month and a half after the Odessa riots I left for Moscow. Three days later general Dubassov came to put down the revolution that he knew was going to take place. It did take place in three more days. The people were slaughtered by the hundred.’

It was interesting that Lubarsky commented on the revolution in Moscow, as one Wissotzky grandson, Alexander Wissotzky was involved in the 1905 Moscow uprising, and there were three other well-known revolutionaries in the family, grandchildren of Wolf Wissotzky, Mikhail Gots and his younger brother Abram Gots, plus the husband of Amalia Gavronsky, Ilya Fondaminsky, who went to France after the revolution and edited an emigre journal publishing the early work of Vladimir Nabokov.

Anna Wissotzky died in 1921 in Paris and her husband died in 1930. Several members of the Wissotzky family were deported from Paris to Auschwitz where they died. There was also an Isaac Sackheim, born in 1884 in Bialystok, the much younger brother of Anna Wissotzky, who was also deported to Auschwitz from Paris. On the Wissotzky online family tree one of Anna’s nieces, Vera Gots, married an unknown Sackheim who could have been Anna’s brother, Isaac. There was quite poignant detailed information online about his deportation. He left the Paris holding camp Drancy on 2 September 1943 and died on 7 September. He probably spent those five days travelling in the cattle cars and was immediately put to death in Auschwitz, as he was already in late middle age. Nothing is known about his wife or whether they had any children.

Quite a large number of emigrants from Odessa to Paris, mostly born in the 1890s and early 1900s, with names in the pogrom death records, were deported to Auschwitz – Groisman, Goichmann, Goldenberg, Guralnik, Meniock, Scher, Schneider, Segal, Tartakowsky.
To be continued…

There was tremendous hope for a new modern society after the Russian revolution and civil war, and a new geometric, dynamic and sometimes playful style in art and design, constructivism, grew in the early 1920s from the avant-garde ideas which developed earlier in the century.

El Lissitsky 1922

Alexandra Exter set design 1927

Soviet textiles 1920s

Although constructivism was revolutionary and full of force and vigour, it was eventually suppressed in favour of social realism, which the working people could understand, and which was not based on a desire for freedom and innovation, anathema to the Bolsheviks. It was probably this force and the geometric patterns and diagonal lines in futurism and constructivism that led to the popular art deco style, which, like Art Nouveau, influenced graphic design, posters, furniture, jewellery, textiles and ceramics.

Clarice Cliff art deco teapot

Art deco Odessa travel poster

Valentina Kulagina 1929 poster commemorating the 1905 revolution

Outside of Russia, purely abstract art was developed mostly through the Bauhaus in the 1920s, and then suppressed by the Nazis in the 1930s. Again Kandinsky was a huge influence.

Kandinsky 1923

Paul Klee 1925

Paul Klee puppets

Many European artists emigrated to America between the wars or just before World War II. A group of them and several Americans such as Jackson Pollock began developing abstract styles after the war. Mark Rothko, born in Russia in 1903, may have something of Malevich and the suprematists in his work, but his paintings of rectangles are also thought to have been inspired by the 1905 pogroms and stories of mass graves that his family told but he almost never spoke of. And so we come full circle back to the pogrom in 1905.

The one style that probably did influence everyday life in the early 1900s was Art Nouveau, which permeated design on every level, from architecture to furniture, wallpaper, illustration, jewellery, advertisements, posters, postcards, shop signs and textiles. There is no one who would not have seen posters on the street, shop signs, book illustration and postcards with the typical swirling patterns of art nouveau, and many household items would have been influenced to some extent.

Odessa postcard 1902

Russian Art Nouveau soap ad

Illustration Vasalisa by Bilibin, 1899

Popular artistic styles like the swirling figures and lettering of art nouveau would only have touched people’s lives minimally in their own homes, through the covers of books or magazines, a vase, or decorated tin.

Vysotsky tea tin

At the same time, an explosion into abstraction in art was beginning in the early 1900s, slowly in Germany and France, following the lead in Art Nouveau with artists like Klimt and Kandinsky, who went back and forth from Germany to Russia. At first, abstraction was brought into design, such as in fabrics, furniture and architecture, but painting soon followed with an incredible liveliness.

Frances Macdonald 1896

Fabric Riemerschmid 1905

Klimt 1905

Cézanne 1905

Matisse 1905

Kandinsky 1909

Kandinsky 1910

Fabric Jonasch 1910

In early 1900s Russia, there was the realist style of painting of Repin, the satirical art of political posters and newspapers, and an Impressionism which moved close to abstraction at times. Artists of different styles responded to the events of 1905, especially the political graphic artists, but others as well.

1905

Ivanov The execution 1905

Isaac Brodsky Mother and sister 1905

Isaac Brodsky was from Odessa. My first impression of this painting of his mother and sister was that the girl seemed frightened and the two were clutching each other. This might be an over interpretation.

The earliest purely abstract art began with Malevich in Russia in 1912, inspired by a movement called suprematism in avant-garde poetry and modernist literature.

Malevich 1912

Suprematist poetry

This movement rejected that art needed to come from the natural or real world but could be centred solely on itself. Kandinsky was originally part of this movement but was later rejected because of his mysticism, seeing other meanings behind his purely abstract forms. The later Russian movement, constructivism, which grew up after the revolution, was inspired by Italian futurism and other movements that developed as artists watched the destruction and mechanisation of life during World War I. It developed through painting, sculpture, graphic design, textiles, theatre design and architecture.